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Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Oh dear. I've really up and done it now... I'm super late in announcing this Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival! You didn't get a mid-week reminder note either?! That would be totally my fault too. Will you so graciously forgive? My totally viable excuse is that we haven't had an internet connection since we left Houston two Mondays ago... and yes, there were McDonald's and Starbucks along the highways and byways, but we've had nothing but straight driving 56 of the last 120 hours! Please accept my sincere apologies. I cannot assure you that it will never happen again, but I can assure you that I hope it will never happen again! ;)

Thankfully, the blog carnival is up and running despite my failures... !

Announcing the most recent edition of the Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival:

Yay! I can't wait for this edition!!! I hope you will consider posting this time around even if you normally don't! Get outside and do some nature study or consider submitting an older post on Nature Study?! Please make sure to submit your posts for the upcoming carnival by no later than 6/13 at 5pm (otherwise it will be auto-postponed until the next carnival by blogcarnival.com)

PS.
I'm sitting in McDonald's using free Wi-Fi, celebrating the eve of the final day of travels... woohoo!

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Even though I haven't blogged in forever, I am still in fact dutifully educating myself for the betterment of my children's education. One of the myriad ways I do this is by reading the suggested (optional, mind you) readings for the twice monthly Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival. Yes, I actually do read them ;) and yes, I do it because I like to :)

Because we are attempting to ever so timidly begin schooling again after an insane long time, we are in need of some helpful reminders on why we do what we do. How convenient then, that the upcoming blog carnival is on Narration, one of the key ingredients to a Charlotte Mason education. As my boys are coming to the age where they are going to be taking more control of their own education, I decided that they too would benefit from a better understanding of why narration is so helpful necessary. So, together we read the PR article,"We Narrate and Then We Know". It was interesting as they critiqued my husband's and my varying methods with narration and pointed out where we had made mistakes along the way. They also had questions, and I shared some pointers on different tools they might use to improve their narrations.

All said, it was an encouraging discussion.

Since then I've been thinking (unlikely isn't it?), about how much information I absorb without experiencing a fantastic rate of retention. I wasn't trained this way unfortunately. But, the principles hold true for children as well as adults. I've got to get better about regularly retelling what I'm learning in order to help my brain remember it. Not only that, but Narration helps us to learn to order our thoughts. Do you ever feel like a muddle brain when you're trying to tell someone something you've read somewhere at some point and can't quite remember the details? If you know me, you know that I have this problem... a lot. Narration can help. With regular narrations, we will improve the way our minds order information and then store it, so that we have it available to share with others! yay!